2006-May-17 - Todays Devotional
'M' is for a Merry Heart
Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Special occasions like Mother's Day put different kinds of burdens on different people. Those whose work involves expressing themselves publicly usually feel that on such occasions they "ought to say something" appropriate to the day. At first I shied away from this, because I always shy away from things that might turn out to be soupy. But as I thought more about it I realized that it wasn't a question of "ought to" but a good excuse to write down just one or two things, at least, about a remarkable mother I know very well--my own. And if I write about her it won't be soupy.
She is nearly seventy-two years old now, and that fact, coupled with people's applying to her adjectives like "alert" and "spry" and "very much alive" remind me that she is in the category of "old." People certainly don't use those adjectives much for other age groups. But it is hard to think of Katharine Gillingham Howard as old.
She lives alone in a house in Florida between some orange groves and a golf course. She makes good use of the groves but she hardly has time even to look at the golf course, let alone play on it. Time does not hang heavy on her hands, and one of the things she does with it is to keep up a steady and cheerful correspondence with her six married children and her fifteen grandchildren. We write to her, make carbons of our letters, and she writes to all of us and sends the carbons around every week.
She has taken a lot of teasing in her life with us, and we still tease her in letters and she teases back. She is one of those people who knows how to laugh, hard. When you stop to think of it, how many people in your acquaintance can laugh hilariously, until tears roll down their faces?
And one of the things we never let her alone about is the way she uses emotionally loaded words. Three of the six of us grew up during the Depression and were taught many small economies, including turning off lights and things. If Mother found a light left on where it wasn't needed, the light was blazing. A radio in an empty room was not just on, it was blaring. A child with no clothes on was not merely naked, he was running around naked. (Of course I'm not saying my mother is the only one who does this. People have asked me I don't know how many times, of the Indian tribe I knew in Ecuador, "Do you mean to say they just run around completely naked?" The idea of people doing quite ordinary things like sitting still or cooking with no clothes on seems to be a hard one to grasp.)
It was not possible, apparently, for Mother simply to take the children downtown. Children were dragged downtown and through the stores. If our friends came to visit us after school they traipsed through the kitchen, traipsed upstairs, traipsed through the bedrooms.
No matter how poor we were, my parents somehow contrived to have a guest room and it was frequently filled. Mother was a good hostess, and it seemed we were always meeting trains in Philadelphia or boats in New York that had missionaries on them, and we understood that it was a privilege to have guests in our home. Schoolboys who came home with my brothers on holidays from boarding school were in a separate category in my mother's mind, I think, though she was very sweet about having them. They were always clattering up and down stairs, sloshing around in the bathroom, and bumping down the halls with suitcases.
My father--very tall, very studious, and very fond of the outdoors--was not much good at all around the house, but occasionally he would try to spare Mother some work by fixing his own or, on very rare occasions, her breakfast. It never turned out especially well because she lay in bed, stark staring awake, and had to listen to him rattling around in the kitchen.
Mother's cooking was strictly sensible, plain and nourishing, and she was an expert at meat and potatoes. (She was raised, my father used to say, on roast beef, while he was brought up on fried smelts, Beauregard eggs, and jelly.) She had no time for fancy salads or dessert. Fresh or canned fruit and store-bought cookies were a fairly standard dessert because they didn't require fiddling.
When I came home from boarding school I felt that the menus at home were just too, too ordinary. "Well," said Mother, not much moved, "you just go ahead and do all the fiddling you want."
If she was talking about a shopping trip to Germantown, which she loved (she had grown up there and no one could ever convince her that there were stores elsewhere equal to Germantown's), she said she would "just run over there." If she was talking about one of my father's numerous speaking engagements, which were sometimes burdensome, he wouldn't run over, he would have to trail way out to Fox Chase or Doylestown.
A single woman named Daphne, who was always on the edge of financial ruin and therefore had to make do with a succession of battered old cars, never just drove to see us, she came trundling down the turnpike.
Well, it must have been quite a life for her. You wonder how anybody survives all the blazing lights, blaring radios, dragging of children, traipsing, clattering, sloshing and bumping, rattling around, fiddling, trailing, and trundling. Now that we have children of our own we know what she means, and increasingly appreciate the color and jollity of the life she made for us. We know, too, that there was a far deeper source of strength than her "merry heart" which, as the writer of the Proverbs said, "doeth good like a medicine." She often needed a great deal more than merriment--she needed a Rock that was higher than she. She found him, and with my father, she led us to him. We are grateful for that, and for what she put up with, and if you were to ask her now to tell about it, it would not sound chaotic or pitiable at all, I think. She would admit that she used all those vivid words, all right, but she would never have thought of them as loaded, and she would probably have to wipe her eyes for laughing at the pictures they recall.
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